One of the things the OU seems to have gone in for big time lately is “learning design”, with all sorts of planning tools and who knows what to try and help us estimate student workloads.

One piece of internal research I saw suggested that we “adopt a University-wide standard for study speed of 35 words per minute for difficult texts, 70 words per minute for normal texts and 120 words per minute for easy texts”. This is complemented by a recommended level 1 (first year equivalent) 60:40 split between module-directed (course text) work and student-directed (activities, exercises, self-assessment questions, forum activity etc) work. Another constraint is the available study time per week – for a 30 CAT point course (300 hours study), this is nominally set at 10 hours study per week. I seem to recall that retention charts show that retention rates go down as mean study time goes up anywhere close to this…

One of the things that seems to have been adopted is the assumption that the first year equivalent study material should all be rated at the 35 words per minute level. For 60% module led work, at 10 hours a week, this gives approximately 35 * 60 * 6 ~ 1200 words of reading per week. With novels coming in around 500 words a page, that’s 20 pages of reading or so.

This is okay for dense text but we tend to write quite around with strong narrative, using relatively straightforward prose, explaining things a step at a time, with plenty of examples. Dense sentences are rewritten and the word count goes up (but not the reading rate… Not sure I understand that?)

As part of the production process, materials go through multiple drafts and several stages of critical reading by third parties. Part of the critical reading process is to estimate (or check) workload. To assist this, materials are chunked and should be provided with word counts and estimated study times. The authoring process uses Microsoft Word.

As far as I can tell, there is an increasing drive to segment all the materials and chunk them all to be just so, one more step down the line rigidly templated materials. For a level 1 study week, the template seems to be five sections per week with four subsections each, each subsection about 500 words or so. (That is, 10 to 20 blog posts per study week…;-)

I’m not sure what, if any, productivity tools there are to automate the workload guesstimates, but over coffee this morning I though I’d have a go at writing a Visual Basic macro to do do some of the counting for me. I’m not really familiar with VB, in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever written a macro before, but it seemed to fall together okay if the document was structured appropriately.

To whit, the structure I adopted was: a section to separate each section and subsection (which meant I could count words in each section); a heading as the first line after a section break (so the word count could be associated with the (sub)section heading). This evening, I also started doodling a convention for activities, where an activity would include a line on its own of the form – Estimated study time: NN minutes – which could then be used as a basis for an activity count and an activity study time count.

Running the macro generates a pop up report and also inserts the report at the cursor insertion point. The report for a section looks something like this:

A final summary report also gives the total number of words.

It should be easy enough to also insert wordcounts into the document at the start of each section, though I’m not sure (yet) how I could put a placeholder in at the start of each section that the macro could update with the current wordcount each time I run it? (Also how the full report could just be updated, rather than appended to the document, which could get really cluttered…) I guess I could also create a separate Word doc, or maybe populate an Excel spreadsheet, with the report data.

Another natural step would be to qualify each subsection with a conventional line declaring the estimated reading complexity level, detecting this, and using it with a WPM rate to estimate the study time of the reading material. Things are complicated somewhat by my version of Word (on a Mac) not supporting regular expressions, but then, in the spirit of trying to build tools at the same level of complexity as the level at which we’re teaching, regex are probably out of scope (too hard, I suspect…)

To my mind, exploring such productivity tools is the sort of thing we should naturally do; at least, it’s the sort of thing that felt natural in a technology department. Computing seems different; computing doesn’t seem to be about understanding the technical world around us and getting our hands dirty with it. It’s about… actually, I’m not sure what it’s about. The above sketch really was a displacement activity – I have no misconceptions at all that the above will generate any interest at all, not even as a simple daily learning exercise (I still try to learn, build or create something new every day to keep the boredom away…) In fact, the “musical differences” between my view of the world and pretty much everyone else’s is getting to the stage where I’m not sure it’s tenable any more. The holiday break can’t come quickly enough… Roll on HoG at the weekend…

PS I’ve no idea what idiomatic VB is supposed to look like; all the examples I saw seemed universally horrible… If you can give me any pointers to cleaning the above code up, feel free to add them in the comments…

PPS Thinks… I guess each section could also return a readability score? Does VB have a readability score function? VB code anywhere implementing readability scores?